June 15, 1962

Books of the Times

By ORVILLE PRESCOTT

Letting Go By Philip Roth

uppose that you thoughtlessly accepted an invitation for the week-end from a young couple you didn't know very
well and weren't sure you liked. And suppose that when you arrived a house party was going on and everyone
seemed just a little cracked. Suppose the host and hostess screamed with rage, threw dishes and collapsed in
hysterics. Suppose some of the guests never shut their bedroom doors, left the lights on and did as they desired.
Suppose the children wept and snarled and were obviously being psychologically ruined for life. Suppose
everybody's troubles were ghastly--no one could cope with anything and moral guilt and general incapacity almost
seemed normal. And you couldn't leave until next Monday morning! If you can suppose all this you have an
inadequate notion of what kind of experience awaits you if you read Philip Roth's novel, "Letting Go."

This is Philip Roth's first novel and second book. His first, "Goodbye, Columbus," was a collectin of short stories
published three years ago when Mr. Roth was only 26. It made Mr. Roth famous and won him no less than four
awards: a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the National Book Award for fiction, a prize for the year's best
book of Jewish interest from the Jewish Book Council of the National Jewish Welfare Board, and one of the eighteen
$1,500 awards given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Seldom has a new writer's debut been greeted
with such acclaim.

Distraught Lives, Each a Story

"Letting Go" is further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent. This is a clumsily constructed novel, but a morbidly
fascinating one. Its emotional tension is nerve-racking, its psychological insight convincing. Mr. Roth has a
phenomenal ear for colloquial dialogue. He is an effective storyteller, although he prefers to tell many separate
stories rather than one unified story. He is as sure and incisive with fleeting minor characters as he is with his
principals. And he has absolutely no taste or sense of restraint at all. This last, of course, is regarded as a literary
virtue in some circles.

"Letting Go" is the story of a few years in the lives of four persons. Part of it is told in the first person by Gabe
Wallach, a wealthy, intelligent, well-intentioned, indecisive college teacher of English. The rest in alternating
chapters is told by Mr. Roth in the conventional third person. Gabe was sorry for other people's troubles and
sincerely tried to be helpful. But he couldn't see why he should become deeply involved, why he should let go and
become responsible for the health, happiness and economic security of others. But life and people sometimes demand
complete participation. Gabe's understandable reluctance haunted his conscience. Not having serious troubles of his
own, he felt guilty. Probably he felt guiltier than he had any cause to feel, but that is a point which is sure to be
widely debated.

Sex in its crudest obsesses everybody. But money, religion, family, children, love or a reasonable facsimile, and a
dozen other crucial matters also preoccupy all of them. Few novels are so deep in squalor, anxiety and emotional
tumult as "Letting Go." And few one is persuaded, are truer to the lives of noisy desperation led by a large
proportion of mankind.

In addition to being a long and intimate study of its four unforgettable principals, "Letting Go" is a harshly satirical
account of many other characters in many different walks of life. Mr. Roth is amusing and touching and shocking by
turns. He writes with a fine combination of sympathy and mockery about middle-class New York Jews, Gabe's and
Paul's relatives. He is savagely satirical about academic opportunists. He is adroit and amusing in his thumbnail
sketches of American types: loathsome old men washed into a dreadful rooming house by a tide of misery; an
abortionist; a Negro hipster; a pregnant girl of 19, mentally subnormal; a bellicose, suspicious, ignorant and
dishonest factory worker out of a job.

"Letting Go" seethes with life. It is disorderly and much too long (630 pages). It is nasty in spots because Mr. Roth
is still so young he wants to shock. But it is not pretentious, mannered or clogged with sterile symbolism. Philip
Roth writes out of his passionate interest in his fellow human beings. He is probably the most talented novelist under
30 in America.